iir + Tyan S2460 + SMP problems

[Scott Long]

Douglas K. Rand wrote:
> Doug> We're having problems with FreeBSD 5.4, 6.0, and 6.1 and an ICP
> Doug> Vortex GDT8546RZ 4 port SATA RAID
> 
> John-Mark> We've had very similar experiences on 4.7-R.  The box would
> John-Mark> hang on one partition waiting for IO to come back, but
> John-Mark> direct access to the disk, or accessing other partitions
> John-Mark> would pass IO fine.
> 
> Interesting, the opposite of our problems. It works perfectly for us
> on 4.x systems, but not in 5.4 and 6.x.
> 
> Doug> Any advice is welcome. Well, except for "dump the Tyan S2460
> Doug> motherboards" maybe.
> 
> John-Mark> How about drop iir?
> 
> While not as expensive as switching motherboards, still a pain. We've
> been very happy with our ICP cards. But your suggestion does have
> merit, especially as recent PCI-X and PCI-E ICP cards have no FreeBSD
> driver in sight.
> 

My understanding is that the ICP division is switching over to the 
architcture supported by the 'aac' driver.  Adaptec provided updates
to this driver last year that include a number of ICP id numbers.  If
you have access to one of these cards that you mention, would you mind
trying the aac driver and reported on whether or not it worked?

Scott